Paddy Power bets on success with web analytics

Paddy Power, Ireland's biggest bookmaker, has extended its investment in web analytics, now that its main Sports Books site accounts for more than 50 per cent of its profits.

The company first took on web analytics from incumbent vendor Speed-Trap in 2005. It this week extended its relationship with the Newbury-based online customer experience analyst firm with a contract valued in excess of £100,000 that will allow it to further optimise its online presence.

Paddy Power has eight commercial websites and uses Speed-Trap to carry out project-based and ad-hoc analysis of functionality affecting the customer experience, like page loading times, the effectiveness of its search functionality and the ease of access to help sections.

Stephen Lovell, content user experience manager at Paddy Power, told IT PRO the contract extension would particularly help in developing analytics on all areas of its key Sport Book site. Speed-Trap is currently responsible for monitoring between 70 and 80 per cent of customer activity on this site.

"We've just completed a small project using Speed-Trap where we've totally revamped the search function, for example," he said. "Customer feedback told us this was an area we needed to improve and our analysis showed conversion rates were likely to be higher, where customers were more likely to place a bet if they could easily find what they were looking for."

He said Speed-Trap was used to indicate where changes needed to be made to the search function and will be used to measure the success of the changes.

Lovell added: "Speed-Trap has also given us indications of where the site may be performing badly in terms of speed and errors so we can trace problems back to software platforms and browser configurations to make changes to the code accordingly."

The new contract will enable Paddy Power to further develop its web presence using active, live data collected from the sites to fine tune their presentation and understand how best to interact with its customers in order to increase revenues and improve online customer experiences. The deal includes annual software licensing, training and ongoing support services.

Paddy Power also uses the quality of service and reporting from the analytics package to inform decision makers across all sections of the business including design and development, marketing and management.

"One disadvantage of an online business is that you lose an opportunity to talk to your customers face-to-face with detailed information about their online behaviour," said Lovell. "We can now gather some of that feedback indirectly."

Email to a friend

Print this page

Social Bookmark this article: What is this?

Digg

Delicious

Reddit

StumbleUpon

Slashdot

Google

Facebook